With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol developers have been making progress in a (record?) number of areas in recent months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle attempts, history expiration, SSZ and more have all seen significant progress recently!
In order to help move each of these threads forward and run one more series of Shapella stress tests, members of the customer team came together in person for a week-long interop event in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️
Unlike Amphora, which had a singular focus on The Merge, this event had two main tracks, focused on the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network upgrades respectively. Several work sessions were also held to delve into other open problems. Here’s a brief overview of what was accomplished, as well as links to artifacts from the workshops and ongoing discussion threads.
Shapella
The week began with a shadow fork of the Shanghai/Capella mainnet. Flooding the network with withdrawal credential update messages revealed performance issues in the network and led to a different consensus layer queue design for processing these messages.
Throughout the week, additional dev networks were released and stress tested with a plethora of credential updates, retirements, and even bad crashes. Customer deployments finished the week hardened and ready for the fork into the newly released Zhejiang test network.
Assuming the Shapella upgrade goes smoothly in Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will upgrade next.
(Proto)Danksharding
The main goal of EIP-4844 interoperability was the release of an EIP-4844 development network for all customers. By Friday, all but one of the clients were syncing across the network!
Several design discussions also took place during the week, stemming from a transaction group design proposal. Questions about allowing “blobleless” 4844 transactions, if and how blocks and blobs must be mated for gossip and how to code these transactions have been extensively discussed and surfaced in the past week AllCoreDevs execution layer call.
Over the next few weeks, the teams hope to finalize all spec changes that result from these discussions and launch a new development network.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
After being conditionally accepted and later withdrawn from Shanghai, EOF was one of the issues where opinions diverged the most about the best way forward.
If EOF should prohibition code introspectionaim for a minimal implementation as soon as possible, or even only ever going live on L2 was discussed during the week.
No concrete specification emerged from the workshop, but the teams now have a shared understanding of the design space and possible ways forward. He EOF meeting rooms resumes next week to continue this conversation!
Everything else
In addition to these three topics, the teams discussed the future of thin clients in the network, how the EL and CL specification processes could converge (and potentially extract ERC from other EIPs), launched a new Verkle Trie test networksubmitted a proposal for SSZ encodes EL transactionsdiscussed change the mechanics of the EL->CL validator depositand even started a Capella Annotated Specifications!
Next steps
Less than a week after the event, customer teams began discussing Shapella’s timelines for testnets. Keep an eye on this blog, as well as customer repositories, for announcements in the coming weeks!
For other efforts, such as EIP-4844, EOF, SSZ, expect to see active design discussions in the coming weeks, which will then lead to prototype deployments.
Shapella is almost here, and Dencun is clear on the horizon 🌅
